ARC Review of A Room Away from the Wolves by Nova Ren Suma

If poetry could be prose then Nova Ren Suma would be the Beatles of it. Her lyrical and often mesmerizing phrasing pulls beauty and atmosphere off the page and fills your senses. Much like a pointillist painter gives you a whole scene from afar but it becomes a blur of tiny points of paint the closest one gets to the portrait.

Or in the case of the ladies in the Catherine house, seeing a picture one the stair case from afar can often be quite different from being up close and personal to the same painting.

Catherine wasn’t scowling anymore. Her eyes were deep black pools, perfectly serene. Her mouth was loose and coming open, a hint of teeth showing. There was no mist or fog- it was all so clear. On her faint gray face was a new and undeniable grin, a hard beam of light that landed straight on me… there inside her frame facing the foyer…

Be careful with beauty. It can become monstrous very quickly. Often lulled into this luxurious platitude of brilliant colors, mysterious people and a quick-witted city, Suma wrenches and lurches the whole thing ajar with a mix of brutal reality bested by mystical madness that interweaves unreliable childhood flashbacks, horrific time-traveling recounts and things seen but not to believed.
It is just as you are comfortable in the beauty of her words that Suma makes you want to take aim at the closest walk, launch the book and yell oh come on man!?
And for me, that is the sign when reading becomes a contact sport, blurring the lines between I can’t put it down and for the sake of my sanity I have to put it down (there are few, few books on this list) but yet come crawling across the room to it, busted up begging for more that I know it is a brilliant piece of art.